SOURCE: Willems, Michèle. “‘Women and Horses and Power and War’: Worship of Mars from 1 Henry IV to Coriolanus.” In French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems, pp. 189-202. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Willems evaluates Hotspur and Coriolanus as exemplars of the cult of military heroism. The critic compares Henry IV, Part 1 and Coriolanus in terms of their depictions of heroic and antiheroic value systems, differences between professional and common soldiers, disparities between warriors and politicians, and conflicts between masculine and feminine virtues.

In his famous speech on the seven ages of man, Jaques puts the soldier in the fourth age, after the infant, the schoolboy, and the lover:

                                                                                                    Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honor, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in...